I'm a technical marketer who had owned a lot of the associated infra over my career. I've historically been a major target for sales people from companies in the space.
I've lost count of the times I've had sales people outright lie to me about how audience data or targeting signals work, particularly about the nuances of privacy aspects which I care a great deal about and have done a lot of work with.
These days if I'm serious about something I ensure there's a competent engineer (even a sales engineer) and product person on the call and largely ignore the sales person. I'm even really upfront about it by saying something like "I'm the decision maker, I have very specific technical and product questions and I want to avoid wasting time for either party by moving quickly or getting to a quick 'no', please confirm you can have XYZ people on our first call."
Usually it's been great that way. If they try to jerk me around with those people being unavailable at the last minute, I tell them I'm rescheduling until they can get their calendars in order.
This all comes with a responsibility though to make sure I'm not wasting their people's time. So I make sure I've done my homework and have likely sent an agenda/list of questions in advance to discuss. Depending on the relative sizes of my and their company, this can also be an express path to getting executive leadership who can cut through the noise of the process and get some good terms for me.
The one that I find easiest to understanding is still the one that I wrote about a decade ago when I first had to work with OAuth 2. All others I understanding by mapping what they said to concepts in mine, and that seems to work pretty well.
There's distinct hubs in West Africa, Southern Africa, and East Africa, but a lack of intercontinental terrestrial connections (there's almost a link across the Sahara, nothing live directly connecting East and West Africa).
From what I can tell, Chad, DRC, and CAR are all not really politically stable, so I don't know how realistic cables running across those countries is.
I mean, I wasted hundreds of hours playing online games as a middle-schooler. Got so addicted that I decided I wanted to learn to make one, so I taught myself C, then C++, then Java when it came out. One thing led to another, I got a few internships, then a job, a CS major, another job, and 15 years later I was one of those Google engineers gaming dopamine cycles for a buck. And the cycle completes!
I've lost count of the times I've had sales people outright lie to me about how audience data or targeting signals work, particularly about the nuances of privacy aspects which I care a great deal about and have done a lot of work with.
These days if I'm serious about something I ensure there's a competent engineer (even a sales engineer) and product person on the call and largely ignore the sales person. I'm even really upfront about it by saying something like "I'm the decision maker, I have very specific technical and product questions and I want to avoid wasting time for either party by moving quickly or getting to a quick 'no', please confirm you can have XYZ people on our first call."
Usually it's been great that way. If they try to jerk me around with those people being unavailable at the last minute, I tell them I'm rescheduling until they can get their calendars in order.
This all comes with a responsibility though to make sure I'm not wasting their people's time. So I make sure I've done my homework and have likely sent an agenda/list of questions in advance to discuss. Depending on the relative sizes of my and their company, this can also be an express path to getting executive leadership who can cut through the noise of the process and get some good terms for me.